Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs xkcd.com/3204/

the magic of the Muppets is that there are two fourth walls. they constantly break the one that reminds the audience they are performers. they NEVER break the one that reminds the audience they are puppets. this dynamic is the key to their entire comedy style

An Ukrainian F-16 intercepting a Russian Shahed drone.

A student received a posthumous postcard from his former professor, Don Glickman, who was known for his humor. He instructed his daughter to send over 100 postcards. The gesture went viral and reflected Glickman's unique approach to life and death.

The start of the inspirational Calum’s Road, built in ten years by one man across two miles of forbidding terrain to give access to the north end of the island of Raasay. More pics and info: www.undiscoveredscot... #Scotland #Raasay #Island #CalumsRoad

Are you looking for a postdoc position working on asteroids and comets? Would it help if it's in a beautiful place in southern France? If yes, then consider applying to the following position of my colleague Benoit Carry at the Observatory in Nice: euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/402212 #planetSci

Cyrus McCormick sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! Cyrus McCormick reaping: This is just the best, I recommend it so highly!

Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

Remembering Arthur C. Clarke on the anniversary of his birthday: 16 December 1917. The father of the communications satellite and author of books such as “The Fountains of Paradise,” “Imperial Earth” and “Rendezvous with Rama,” and of course “2001: A Space Odyssey” co-written with Stanley Kubrick.

A person born in China at the end of WWII saw China's power rise as its working age population tripled in their lifetime. But now it has plateaued. A person born today will see that growth reversed. China's working age population will drop by 1 million people per month for decades.

Good news. We have a dry dock to repair the submarine. Bad news. It's in Crimea and contains the other submarine Ukraine destroyed.

I’d like to share this wonderful Yuletide site from 2003 with my Bluesky correspondents. A music critic reviews 50 Xmas songs in "Tris McCall's Christmas Abstract." It's thought-provoking, it's funny, and I re-read it every year. Merry Christmas! web.archive.org/web/20080308...

Hubble reobserved interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on November 30. At the time, the comet was about 178 million miles (286 million kilometers) from Earth. Hubble tracked the comet as it moved across the sky. As a result, background stars appear as streaks of light: https://go.nasa.gov/4iCU2lH 🔭 🧪

All chess is 4D chess that's why they have that time clock thingy.

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

Betty Boop St. Thomas, ND

For the first time, all of the docking ports on the International Space Station are full. Which means this old Sid Harris cartoon that's been stuck in my head for decades finally makes sense. www.nasa.gov/blogs/spaces...

Recent news from the spacecraft photobombing my profile pic. The work by Brian Sutter to find a trajectory to Apophis and the thermal engineers at Lockheed Martin to make a close perihelion possible and a host of mission operators to enable this is very cool and I look forward to pics in 2029.

NASA's OSIRIS-APEX just flew past Earth, making a course adjustment to asteroid Apophis in 2029. Apophis will come very close to us that year & could hit in the future. OSIRIS-APEX will tell us a lot about Apophis...assuming the mission survives budget cuts. 🔭🧪 news.arizona.edu/news/osiris-...

Two significant takeaways from this: - done in broad daylight - done out of range and relative safety of Russian Navy & air power To compensate Russia would need to devote security teams to every tanker – which even then is no magic cure – at a time when they have manpower issues. Smart tactics.

HiRISE Image of Exocomet 3I/ATLAS! On 2 October 2025, MRO turned away from Mars to image 3I/ATLAS, only the third interstellar object ever observed passing through our solar system! https://www.uahirise.org/releases/3i-atlas/

There's nowhere quite like Stromness in Orkney. It stretches for over a mile along the shore of Hamnavoe, an inlet of Scapa Flow. The core of the town is a main street that twists and turns between the shoreline and the hillside behind. More pics and info: www.undiscoveredscot... #Scotland #Orkney

Ukrainian F-16 chasing an Russian Kh-Type cruise missile. It paraphrases once more why it was a good move to deliver the F-16.

For the astronomers: I found an accretion disk diagram cheese. A quesar.

I am on my way home to Toronto and the aurorae are absolutely phenomenal. If you are anywhere in the northern half of the continent, get outside and look up! Or better still, put your camera on a 10 second exposure and point it up.

Pretty good aurora visible from our back porch in Chicago!

It might not look like much, but that white blob in the middle of this image is comet 3I/ATLAS—the third known interstellar visitor ever—photographed from the orbit of Mars.

"Everything not a sheep is dangerous" works pretty well for Australia too, tbf

Not now, monkey’s!

I have occasionally imagined an alternate history in which geologists were just a few decades slower to notice tectonic plates, and they get discovered by angry cartographers and astronomers detecting their real-time motion instead. imgs.xkcd.com/comics/conti...

See, this is the problem with California's lax approach to crime. If you don't jail otters the first time you catch them stealing surf boards, they'll just do it again.

A person born in China at the end of WWII saw China's power rise as its working age population tripled in their lifetime. But now it has plateaued. A person born today will see that growth reversed. China's working age population will drop by 1 million people per month for decades.

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

The Dept. of Education has pulled funding for programs in 8 states that support students with both hearing and vision loss. A staffer at one program says he was told the Trump admin. took issue with 2 words on the grant application: “transition" and “privilege": www.propublica.org/article/trum...

Vaccines are battle training for your immune system. If you could give it intel on the enemy, why would you withhold that? Give me ALL the vaccines! I want to be prepared for everything!

80 years ago, as WWII was ending, a young RAF engineer and science fiction enthusiast named Arthur C. Clarke published a short piece titled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays" in the October 1945 issue of Wireless World. It changed the world. 🧵

apparently, yesterday was National Hummingbird Day, and it reminded me of something I saved off the other place a few years ago - someone (I’ve lost who, sorry) made this KC-135 Hummingbird feeder! It got me thinking about a fighter-sized bird.. 1/3

Here’s a picture of the Moon right now just in case weather or location do not permit you to see it.

First powered flight of the Talon-A testbed, dropped off a pylon from a Stratolaunch 'Roc': youtu.be/9UYj6jOXDV8 It's 8.5m long and under 3 tons, and it reached close to Mach 5 using its 22 kN kerolox rocket engine from Ursa Major.

It was the Kuybyshevsk refinery, not the neighboring Novokuybyshevsk refinery.

Imagine the complicated and precious genius of the girl who made this embroidery sampler in 1811 The Solar System, sampler, unknown maker, 1811, England. Museum no. T.92-1939. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

I wish to pass this magnificent tweet along for you to read.

Just realised the previous post's 2nd & 3rd were by Frank R Paul, which I posted 4 months ago on one of his anniversaries, so here's some more Hugo Gernsback-edited 'Science and Invention' illustrations from 1920-1921 (1&4 Howard V Brown, 2 George Wall, 3 [couldn't identify - possibly Frank R Paul):

Dark Star (1974): Scout spaceship, art by Ron Cobb

PS if you’re a member of the press: I and my colleagues will happily talk about 3I/ATLAS until the (interstellar) cows come home. But my only comment on whether it’s an alien spacecraft is: Avi is talking nonsense on stilts, and doesn’t understand comets.

Sometimes one sees a structure and thinks, 'damn, that would look badass in SAR'

On August 7, 2025, James Lovell passed away — the astronaut who flew to the Moon twice but never set foot on it. In a brief cameo role at the end of #Apollo13, he shakes hands with Tom Hanks, who played him — a touching moment between reality and movie. #RIPJamesLovell #apollo13 Www.contactlight.de

Volatile time! As anticipated for a comet ☄️, interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is now showing water - thanks to OH emission seen by Swift in the UV. A little distant at 3.51 au, but that suggests it could be from water ice grains in the coma. Xing et al., ApJL submitted 🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2508.04675

Some real numbers on Juno. After its insertion into its initial Jovian orbit, the estimated remaining propellant mass was 785 kg. Loeb et al. assumed they had 2032 kg to work with to get their needed Del V of 2.7 km/s. www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_k...